CHAPTER VIII. A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE
CURIOUSLY enough there was at this moment and at this place no return fire from the enemy. From this we deduced that the infantry in their impetuous onrush had so far outtravelled the heavy and more cumbersome arms of their service that the artillery had not caught up yet. However, a little later projectiles from hostile field pieces began to drop on our side of the stream.
Halfway of the length of the street our car halted. It did not seem the part of wisdom for the four of us to go ahead in a group, so I walked the rest of the way to spy out the land.
Behind the shattered stone and plaster houses French soldiers were squatted or lying. In the hope of finding some one who could speak the only language I knew I continued on until I came to the last two houses in the row. They overhung the riverbank. Beyond them were two bridges spanning the little river, one an old steel bridge with a concrete roadbed, and the other a sagging wooden structure, evidently built by soldier hands.
The mouth of the military bridge was stopped with a makeshift barricade thrown together any which way. The backbone of the barrier was formed of two tree trunks, but they were half hidden from sight beneath a miscellaneous riffle of upturned motor lorries, wheelbarrows and clustered household furniture, including many mattresses that plainly had been filched from the villagers' abandoned homes. Midway of the main bridge a handful of French engineers were pottering away, rather leisurely, I thought, at some job or other. Two Tommies were standing behind one of the farthermost buildings of the hamlet—a building which in happier days had been a café. Now it was a broken shell, foul inside with a litter of wreckage. The men wore the insignia of the Royal Lancers.
As I approached them they saluted, evidently mistaking me, in my trench coat and uniform cap, for an American officer. That an American officer should be in this place, so far away from any American troops, did not seem to surprise them in the least.
“What town is this?” was my first question.
“It's called Pontoise, sir,” answered one of them, giving to the name a literal rendition very different from the French fashion of pronouncing this word.
“What's going on out yonder on the bridge?” I inquired next.
“The Frenchmen is minin' it to blow it up, sir. They mined it once already but the charge didn't explode, sir. Now they're goin' to give it another try. They'll be letting off the charge pretty soon, sir, I think—as soon as a few of their men and a few of ours who're over on the other bank in them bushes 'ave fallen back to this side 'ere.”
“How close are the Germans?” I asked.
I figured they must be uncomfortably close. They were.
“Come along with me, sir, if you don't mind,” quoth my informant.
Quite in the most casual way he led me out from behind the shelter of the ruined café. As we quitted its protection I could see over a broken garden wall the British battery down below at the left, firing as fast as the gunners could serve the pieces. Of all the men in sight these shirt-sleeved artillerymen were the only ones who seemed to have any urgent business in hand.
Together we advanced to the barricade, which at the spot where we halted came up to our middles. Across the top of it my guide extended a soiled hand.
“The beggars are right there, sir, in them bushes; about a 'undred and fifty yards away, sir, or two 'undred at the most,” he said with the manner of a hired guide. “You carn't see them now, sir, but a bit ago I 'ad a peep at a couple of 'em movin' about. The reason they ain't firin' over 'ere is because they don't want us to locate 'em, I think, sir.”
“Oh!” I said, like that. “Oh!”
By mutual but unspoken consent we then retired to our former position. The imperturbable Tommy fell back in good order, but I think possibly I may have hurried somewhat. I always was a fairly brisk walker, anyhow.
Inside the breached building my companions joined me, and while the shells from the battery and from the other batteries farther away went racketing over us toward Noyon we held a consultation of war. Any desire on the part of any one to stay and see what might happen after the bridge had been blown up was effectually squelched by the sudden appearance of two British officers coming through the village toward us. Did they choose to interrogate us regarding our mission in this parlous vicinity there might be embarrassment in the situation for us. So we went away from there.
As we departed from the place a certain thing impressed itself upon my consciousness. The men about me—the two Tommies certainly, the two officers presumably, and probably the Frenchmen—had but newly emerged from hard fighting. Of a surety they would very shortly be engaged in more hard fighting, striving to prevent the on-moving Germans from crossing the river. Over their head shells from their own guns were racking the air. Shells from hostile batteries were beginning to splatter down just beyond. This then was merely an interval, an interlude between acts of a most dire and tremendous tragedy.
And yet so firmly had the chance of death and the habit of war become a part of their daily and their hourly existence that in this brief resting spell they behaved exactly as men engaged in some wearing but peaceful labour might behave during a nooning in a harvest field. No one in sight was crouching in a posture of defence, with his rifle gripped in nervous hands and his face set and intent. Here were being exemplified none of the histrionic principles of applied heroics as we see them on the stage.
The Frenchmen were sprawled at ease behind the walls, their limbs relaxed, their faces betokening only a great weariness. One or two actually were asleep with their heads pillowed on their arms. Those who spoke did so in level, unexcited tones. They might have been discussing the veriest commonplaces of life. For all I knew to the contrary, they were discussing commonplaces. The two British privates leaned upon their rifles, with their tired legs sagging under them and with cigarette ends in their mouths. One of the officers was lighting a pipe as we drove past him. One of the Frenchmen was gnawing at a knuckle of bread.
Indeed there was nothing about the scene, except a knowledge of the immediate proximity of German skirmishers, which would serve to invest it with one-tenth of the drama that marked a hundred other sights we had that day witnessed. Later, though, we learned we had blundered by chance upon the very spot where the hinge of the greatest battle of history next day turned.
It was south of Noyon at the Pontoise ford and at other fords above and below Pontoise that the Germans designed to cross the river in their onslaught southward against the defences of Paris. But there they failed, thanks be to British desperation and French determination; and it was then, according to what students of strategy among the Allies say, that the hosts of the War Lord altered the plan of their campaign and faced about to the westward in their effort to take Amiens and sunder the line of communication between Paris and Calais—an effort which still is being made as I sit here in Paris writing these pages for the mail.
The day's journey was not over by any manner of means, but so far as I personally was concerned its culminating moment passed when I walked out on the bridge timbers with that matter-of-fact young Royal Lancer. What followed thereafter was in the nature of a series of anticlimaxes, and yet we saw a bookful before we rode back to Soissons for a second night under bombardment in that sorely beset and beleaguered old city. Before heading back we cruised for ten kilometres beyond Noyon, going west by south toward Compiègne.
On this side jaunt we mostly skirted the river, which on our bank was comparatively calm but which upon the farther bank was being contended for at the bayonet's point by British and French against Germans. The sound of the cannonading never ceased for a moment, and as dusk came on the northern horizon was lit up with flickering waves of a sullen dull red radiance. The nearer we came to Compiègne the more numerous were the British, not in squads and detachments and bits of companies but in regiments and brigades which preserved their formations even though some of them had been reduced to skeletons of their former proportions. In the fields alongside the way the artillerymen were throwing up earthen banks for the guns; the infantrymen were making low sod walls behind which they would sleep that night and fight on the morrow. From every hand came the smell of brewing tea, for, battle or no battle, the Tommy would have his national beverage. The troop horses were being properly bestowed in the shaggly thickets, and camp fires threw off pungent smells of wood burning. For the first time in a long time the campaign was outdoors, under the skies.
I saw one fagged trooper squatting at the roadside, with a minute scrap of looking-glass balanced before him in the twigs of a bare bush, while he painfully but painstakingly was shaving himself in cold ditch water. He had fought or marched all day, I imagine; his chances of being sent to eternity in piecemeal before another sunset were exceedingly good; but he would go, tidied and with scraped jowls, to whatever fate might await him. And that, except for one other small thing, was the most typically English thing I witnessed in the shank of this memorable evening.
The other incident occurred after we had faced about for our return. In a maze of byroads we got off our course. A lone soldier of the Bedfordshires—a man near forty, I should say at an offhand guess—was tramping along. Our driver halted our car and hailed him. He straightened his weary back and came smartly to a salute.
“We've lost our way,” explained one of us.
He smiled at us whimsically.
“I'm afraid I can't help you, sirs,” he said in the tones of an educated man. “I've lost my own way no less than six times to-day. I may add that I'm rather a stranger in these parts myself.”
When we got to Blérincourt with an hour of daylight and another hour of twilight yet ahead of us we turned north toward Chauny, which the Germans now held and which the Allies were bombarding furiously. We had come to a crossroads just back of a small village, when with a low spiteful hiss of escaping air one of our rear tires went flat. We stopped to replace the damaged tube with a better one. Behind us, a quarter of a mile or so away, a British baggage train was making bivouac for the night. Just in front of us a British battery was firing over the housetops of the empty village toward Chauny.
We had the car jacked up and the old tire off the rim and the new one half on when—bang! the heavens and the world seemed to come together all about us. What happened was that a big shell of high explosives, fired from an enemy mortar miles away, had dropped within seventy, sixty yards of us in a field; what seemed to happen was that a great plug was pulled out of the air with a smiting and a crashing and a rending. The earth quivered as though it had taken a death wound. Our wind shield cracked across under the force of the concussion. Gravel and bits of clay descended about us in a pattering shower.
Speaking for myself, I may say that one of the most noticeable physical effects of having a nine shell exploding in one's immediate vicinity is a curious sinking sensation at the pit of the stomach, complicated with a dryness of the mouth and sudden chill in the feet.
Two more shells dropped within a hundred yards of us before we got that tire pumped up and departed. Even so, I believe the world's record for pumping up tires was broken on this occasion. I am in position to speak with authority on this detail, because I was doing the pumping.